M45A1.com covers three branches of research: Military Issued Pistols (the FOIA-documented decomm fleet, detailed below), Commercial Pistols (civilian-market variations), and Prototypes (pre-production and test-and-eval examples that never reached standard issue or retail sale).
The USMC M45A1 Close Quarters Battle Pistol was manufactured by Colt Defense LLC under contract MABM111880BA, delivered to MARSOC beginning in 2013. 4,036 pistols were delivered total — 3,411 operational under CLIN 0001AA, 625 in long-term storage under CLIN 0008AA.
This archive was built from a GCSS-MC logistics data release obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, comprising 576,000+ rows of custody chain data covering the full lifecycle of the operational fleet — from manufacture through MARSOC fielding, deployment, and decommissioning.
All data is derived from publicly released government documents. Individual Marine names do not appear in any published records.
Commercial Pistols research draws on a different kind of source material — personal observation, collected and cross-referenced since 2013. Examples are seen, photographed, or directly handled, and confidence-tiered by how that evidence was obtained.
Prototypes research draws on factory letters issued by Colt Archives, a separate entity from Colt itself that researches factory records to produce authorized documentation — considered the gold standard of provenance among collectors.
MiMoSA Research is a military firearms research project built around documented history. The work centers on building verified histories for U.S. military weapons systems — tracing individual serialized weapons from contract and manufacture through service, deployment, and into the civilian market. Primary source documents are used wherever available; government FOIA releases, DoD logistics records, manufacturer documents, and collector-contributed data all feed into the research.
Where possible, findings are published openly so the record survives beyond any single researcher or archive.
The M45A1 is the flagship project, but it is not the only one. MiMoSA Research is a major contributor to the SIG Sauer M17 surplus crowd-sourced data collection effort, and the YouTube channel covers any firearm with a history worth documenting — military service weapons, collector pieces, and anything else that turns up an interesting story.
If you have documentation, transfer records, or provenance information for a military surplus firearm, we want to hear from you.
MiMoSAResearch.com ↗The research underlying this archive would not exist without the diligent work of the staff at the USMC FOIA Office. Their professionalism in processing requests and their commitment to transparency made this record possible. We are grateful for their service.